Erlang on Neo1973 cellphone

This evening, after fighting bitbake (in the form of the capricious “insane.bbclass” class definition) for a good few hours, I managed to get Erlang version R11B-5 running on my new cellphone.

Running the interactive erlang shell on a cellphone is pretty cool. Erlang’s built-in clustering support works fine: I’ve successfully connected an erlang node on my pc to a node on the phone using the USB ethernet support the phone provides.

The base package compiles down to a bit less than 7MB, which is a bit large. The full suite of libraries are another 22MB or so. It’s certainly possible to fine-tune the packaging process to get a smaller distribution, but for now I’m happy developing against what I have.

Update: I’ve posted my changed build scripts to OpenEmbedded’s bug tracker at bug 3014. Here’s a direct link to the tarball, if anyone would like to try it themselves.